Pimp My Writing

Roy Peter Clark helps us understand why ancient story forms dominate pop culture: Years ago, I worked with a high school student who had written a story for the school paper about a wheelchair bowling league. A group of students met with the bowlers and had the chance to see what it was like to overcome a disability. The student wrote a short but inspiring story about the triumph of the human spirit.

Later, she revealed to a class that it had been a horrible experience for all the students at the bowling alley. Some of the wheelchair bowlers were cranky, dismissive, angry, horny, obnoxious. I asked why she hadn't written that. "I wanted to write a good story," she said, "about people overcoming obstacles."

The idea that all people in wheelchairs who bowl are noble is what Don Murray would call a "cliché of vision," a distorted picture of reality based on the requirements of a story form. Tool #38 in the book "Writing Tools" advises writers to "Prefer archetypes to stereotypes." But even archetypes can be dangerous.